While your point is technically accurate, my intuitive sense of things is that it is less likely than her expressing that she was with the Bible on the subject and getting slapped down by the progressive thought police.

But here she was studying to become a counselor and she hewed to her views while counseling.

And the ACA has particular national standards that a counselor is required to meet. And, she wanted to be a school counselor. Do you think that her unwillingness to counsel homosexuals, etc. might have inhibited her abilities to meet the students' needs?

"Unwilling to counsel" or "Willing to counsel according to biblical values"?

I think an interesting question/dilema is presented here. On one side we have the point you are making. On the other there is the exclusion from counseling of those with biblical values. Myself I come down on the side of diversity in counseling options though I suspect that most gays will not be choosing her.

Because she doesn't meet the professional standards of the profession. You can't be a practicing attorney without passing a bar exam. You have to have take be certified to be an accountant or a nurse, or a .... It is the professional standard. She did NOT meet the standard.

Also, each college or university makes its own rules about what classes must be taken and passed to earn a degree. You know how much being a 1L sucks. You had to take those classes.

Dr. David Kaplan, the chief professional officer for the ACA, said he's not surprised that Keeton's case is in the appeals court but that her actions are a direct violation of ACA standards."The ACA code of ethics is not about asking anybody to change their beliefs," Kaplan said. "Counselors clearly have the prerogative to have whatever religion they want. One of the points that gets lost in all of this stuff, from the Keeton side, is our clients are more important than we are ... We are there for them. They are not there for us."

"Because she doesn't meet the professional standards of the profession"

OK, please educate me (no snarkiness intended): To what is the "professional standard" applied? Are you saying that professional standards don't apply to Christian schools?

Also remaining is why she is excluded from acquiring the education? -- Wouldn't certification arguably be a separate question?

She isn't being excluded from her education. She is refusing to follow the curicculum. Every professional, graduate or undergraduate program has the right to have required classes (or perhaps a menu of classes). You can't get a law degree without a Constitutional Law class, even if your plan is to practice family law... or leave law for the high paying world of stick fighting. The program offered a remediation class. She originally said she would take it, and then refused to do so.

Let me ask you this: if there was a religion that did not believe that 2+2=4, that algebra and geometry were the tools of the devil, and that calculus was heretical because Isaac Newton, not God, invented it, would you be railing so hard that that a practitioner of that faith system was denied a math degree? Or might you suggest that the believer major in something else?

I'm not getting "refusing to follow the curriculum" from this-- to me it reads that she refused to be, to use the old communist term, "re-educated":

"Here’s how the situation unfolded. The university‘s program apparently stressed that students couldn’t discriminate against others based on any indicators, including sexual orientation. But Keeton, citing her religious views, refused to alter her engagement with gay students and clients (clearly, these views impacted her relations with these individuals). It’s not clear exactly what Keeting said inside or outside of the classroom that created such a stir, but this is certainly an interest First Amendment case to continue watching.

"While the school argues that Keeton deserved to be dismissed, the former student says that she, in fact, was the victim of discrimination — especially considering the fact that she was kicked out of the program explicitly over her personal beliefs.

"She was initially put on probation and was told that she would need to follow a “remediation plan” to remain in good standing with the university. This plan, though, included sensitivity training, writing papers about tolerance and the lessons she had learned and attendance at gay pride events. Naturally, Keeton refused to comply and she was removed from the program."

I'm not persuaded by your math analogy. 2+2=4, that is not a matter of opinion. The question presented here is.

My thought process is rather simple. People are free to be gay. Other people are free to make of it what they will.

I'm not getting "refusing to follow the curriculum" from this-- to me it reads that she refused to be, to use the old communist term, "re-educated":

I'm not persuaded by your math analogy. 2+2=4, that is not a matter of opinion. The question presented here is.

My thought process is rather simple. People are free to be gay. Other people are free to make of it what they will.

The university‘s program apparently stressed that students couldn’t discriminate against others based on any indicators, including sexual orientation. But Keeton, citing her religious views, refused to alter her engagement with gay students and clients (clearly, these views impacted her relations with these individuals).

And you don't understand that she violated the terms that the university set up. Before she got to the program. And that she is not the only person subject to this requirement. And that this is true no matter what religion she follows (or if she doesn't follow)?

2+2=4 is not opinion, nor is it fact.

"Other people are free to make of it what they will." This is also not fact.

Being surprised that there was no reply, Guro, I went back and read my post. For reasons I am unsure of, two links I thought I had included were not present on my prior post. My apologies, as I think the lack of links makes the reply snarky, which was not intended.

Oh, I fully get that-- but my sentence which you quote needs to be read as part of the paragraph in which it is found. "My thought process is rather simple. People are free to be gay. Other people are free to make of it what they will."

I read the whole thing, but it still isn't true. People have the right to have their opinions, but they don't have the unlimited right to act on them (which I think you mean since you say "make", which implies, I think, an action toward the gay person, especially with the addition of "of it what they will"). The point is, she didn't just have the opinion, she acted on it. And, without knowing what was said, you can't know that her removal from the program was unwarranted.

That said, I stick with my POV. I think people should be allowed to choose with whom they associate.

Agreed. but only one of us has decided the merits of the decision.

I also agree that there is a free choice with whom to associate. Nothing I said should be read as contrary to that view. But, that is also different that merely allowing people to act as they will, without limits.

"While your point is technically accurate, my intuitive sense of things is that it is less likely than her expressing that she was with the Bible on the subject and getting slapped down by the progressive thought police."

BD: "I also agree that there is a free choice with whom to associate. Nothing I said should be read as contrary to that view. But, that is also different that merely allowing people to act as they will, without limits."

So you oppose discrimination laws?

And subject to the limits of the rights of others, what is wrong with people acting as they will?

I really struggle with this because of the unique history of horrors towards black Americans. To say that people can hire whom they choose puts one directly in harm's way of being stained, slimed, and slandered as a vile hate monger in favor of Sheriff Bull Connor and his dogs and fire hoses.

But note-- Sheriff BC was STATE discrmination-- and THAT violates the Constitution! In other words, arguably part of the answer with regard to the pre-Civil Rights black experience in the Deep South consists of simply eliminating government sponsored and/or imposed discrimination

Much of the problem now however comes from using the black experience and our legal response to it as a model for any and every group which underperforms the mean and the legal construct of "disparate impact". Things have gotten so wildly out of hand that now ultimately yes, I think people should be allowed to employ and rent to whom they wish.

Where in the Constitution is the Congress empowered to pass laws against personal discrimination? Arguably through interstate commerce, which I could accept-- if interstate commerce were defined as it was by our Founding Fathers-- but what we have now is headed towards Orwellian doublespeak.

"While your point is technically accurate, my intuitive sense of things is that it is less likely than her expressing that she was with the Bible on the subject and getting slapped down by the progressive thought police."

BD: "I also agree that there is a free choice with whom to associate. Nothing I said should be read as contrary to that view. But, that is also different that merely allowing people to act as they will, without limits."

So you oppose discrimination laws?

And subject to the limits of the rights of others, what is wrong with people acting as they will?

We are moving beyond the specific discussion that flowed from a specific example, and I don't want to extend my vantage point from that example too far.

I oppose some "discrimination" laws, yes. For example, as I have noted previously, I do not understand the legitmacy, purpose or usefulness of a designated "hate" crime. The very purpose of allowing judges to have some sentencing judgement is to allow for all the particulars of a case (age; brutality; number of previous convictions; etc.). One of the particulars could be reason for the crime, based on race, gender, sexuality, and the like. No need for an automatic +10 years.

I disagree that blacks are underperforming. There is a disadvantage that comes with skin color. On a socio-economic scale, almost everything was legally skewed against blacks until the late 1960's. People talk about 40 years (or 150 if they like to pretend that the Civil War ended legal inservitude) like it was a long time ago. It wasn't. It was two generations. It takes time to accumulate wealth. It takes time for blacks to climb corporate ladders. It takes time for them to build on careers of their parents. 3 generations of Bush's have been active politically. Mitt Romney's father was governor before a formal end to segregation. It takes time to build social capital. We can talk all we want about a post-racial America, but until 6 years ago I lived in a city in which the most popular pizza delivery store wouldn't deliver to the black neighborhoods.

As for Guro's point about the Commerece Clause, I think it is (mostly) interpreted in the manner in which the Founders, in particular Madison, intended. The difference isn't the interpretation, it is the commerce. In 1790, commerce was much more local. Family farms, local industry, etc. was much more common. In a world in which Anheuser Busch is owned by a European Company, but the headquarters is in St. Louis, but it is bottled and distributed throughout the country and sold in stores like Walmart (which is headquarted in Arkansas and has stores nation and world wide), where does local commerce begin and end? In 1790, there was no interstate highways, no nationwide train, trucking and airline industry, no FedEx, Amazon or....

As for association, there is no constitutional guarantee to it. Take a look. It does not appear in the first amendment. That it is a recognized right is thanks to a judicial construct. Who is to say that the judicial construct of freedom of association is any more or less legitimate than the protections afforded a traditionally legally disadvantaged group (especially one that was the subject of three constitutional amendments in the hopes of equalizing the playing field)?

And, I am not sure that any freedom to "association" recognized by the courts relates to employment or renting. I AM sure that laws passed by Congress, and signed by presidents, and upheld by courts do prevent employment discrimination based on gender, race, religion, creed and the like.

I would suggest that Freedom of Association is to be found in the Ninth and that the question presented here is exactly what enumerated power is being exercised by the Congress to impose association?

To tax? Oh, I crack me up!

A possible list, all taken from those powers enumerated in Article I, section 8:

The Congress shall have Power To:

provide for the ... general Welfare;

regulate Commerce ... among the several States (see my post above);

make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.

1) "Where in the Constitution is the Congress empowered to pass laws against personal discrimination? Arguably through interstate commerce, which I could accept-- if interstate commerce were defined as it was by our Founding Fathers-- but what we have now is headed towards Orwellian doublespeak."

2) General Welfare: I'm having a hard time thinking the legislative intent of the authors of the C. was for Congress to have the power to tell people e.g. whom they must employ.

Well if you have a sufficent number of employees and their make up of race, religion, ethnic origin, and LGBT varies from the statistical mean, you have the EEOC or some rejected prospect saying "Disparate impact!" I remember one SCOTUS case from law school (Duke vs. Griggs Power or soemthing like that) which held that intelligence tests were racially discriminatory! WTF!?! Doesn't the holding reduce to saying that blacks are stupider?!?

I'm fed up with this sort of excrement! The whole discimination thing has become an industry, a vehicle for government meddling, and parasitic lawsuits!!!

If people are left to their own devices things will work out-- probably sooner than if culture wars are set off by trying to force things on people.

Taking the gay issue. It is being worked out by the culture as a whole and legal meddling simply provokes unnecessary culture wars. It is being worked out be free individuals in their own lives developing their own understandings with those around them.

You don't think that culture and law are related? For example, as law afforded protection to those who "out" themselves, it becomes easier to be "out." This, in turn, increases the likelihood that more people know someone who is gay (or admitting to be gay), which in turn makes them more likely to be part of that cultural shift... and vote, and least in part, on the politicans' willingess to protect gay right, by passing laws.

This is a nice post by Bigdog: "Congress doesn't tell people who they must employ. Congress tells employers who they can't exclude from employment based on characteristics that have nothing to do with merit."

I think it comes closer to describing how the laws ought to be (if congress was authorized that power in the constitution) than how they are. Also it is the agencies, more so than congress, who write the devil into the details.

"Congress tells employers who they can't exclude from employment based on characteristics that have nothing to do with merit."

If this were true, then we would not have the whole "disparate impact" line of attack. Tangential perhaps, but perhaps worth noting nonetheless, is that one of the accelerators of the housing bubble was the "Community Reinvestment Act" which pushed banks into making mortgage loans to unworthy non-white individuals lest the banks be accused of racism.

"Congress tells employers who they can't exclude from employment based on characteristics that have nothing to do with merit."

While this might have been a reasonable compromise, I note that, having seen where the logic of this all seems to wind up, I am going a step further and now say that one's workday is a major part of one's life. Whom one hires should be by whatever criteria one wishes.

I'll grant a certain acceleration of cultural change as a result of law, but I also assert such actions have a backlash--- especially when courts overrule initiatives and laws. A very good case can be made I think, that peaceful change is better than change imposed by force, and that the various ways liberal fascism uses the laws to impose its values on everyone (e.g. Roe v. Wade) is leading to a profound schism in American society.

Supporters of racial preferences like to employ the rhetoric of opportunity and a hand-up for the disadvantaged. But most of the time their real motive is simply favoritism by skin color, regardless of background, as was brutally exposed in Wednesday's Supreme Court oral argument in Fisher v. University of Texas.

In defending preferences, UT's lawyer Gregory Garre had pointed out in a written brief that "The African-American or Hispanic child of successful professionals in Dallas" has a harder time getting into the university if he doesn't finish in the top 10% of his high school class.

"Now, that's your argument?" asked Justice Samuel Alito. "If you have—you have an applicant whose parents are—let's say they're—one of them is a partner in your law firm in Texas, another one is a part—is another corporate lawyer. They have income that puts them in the top 1% of earners in the country" and the "parents both have graduate degrees. They deserve a leg-up against, let's say, an Asian or a white applicant whose parents are absolutely average in terms of education and income?"

Mr. Garre replied by saying no, and then elaborated that "Because, Your Honor, our point is, is that we want minorities from different backgrounds. We go out of our way to recruit minorities from disadvantaged backgrounds."

Justice Anthony Kennedy: "So what you're saying is that what counts is race above all."

Few issues at the crossroads of constitutional law and policy are quite as fraught with cultural and racial tension as affirmative action, which is why it is important to stress that "Mismatch" isn't about intelligence or IQ or even, in a sense, academic ability; it is about academic preparation, the Achilles' heel of American education.

The problem is the simple math that results from a deficient K-12 educational system for minorities: There just aren't enough academically prepared black and, to a somewhat lesser degree, Hispanic students to fill America's top colleges at the median level of academic preparation, a level that is determined mostly by Asian and white applicants. To remedy this problem, administrators add the equivalent of 100 points or more to the SAT scores of many minority applicants. Administrators tend to call this policy affirmative action, because surveys show that Americans of all races approve of affirmative action. But it is actually a system of racial preferences, which surveys show that Americans of all races overwhelmingly reject.

In the view of Richard H. Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr.—respectively, a professor of law at the University of California, Los Angeles and a distinguished legal journalist—the current system of preferences does discriminate against Asian and white students. But that isn't what most disturbs the authors. The real cost, they say, is that years of "happy talk" about the educational value of diversity have obscured a terrible fact: If you place students who are less academically prepared in classes where most of the students are more academically prepared, the gap will be punishing and possibly humiliating to the less prepared students. Professors will teach to the middle of the class. Those toward the bottom—particularly in the sciences—will struggle to keep up.

The ordeal of mismatch first became apparent in the mid-1990s, with data from students pursuing majors in science, technology, engineering or math—so-called STEM majors. Blacks at Ivy League colleges, it turned out, aspired to pursue STEM subjects slightly more than whites, but they ended being half as likely to finish with a STEM degree. Research by Dartmouth psychologists Rogers Elliott and A. C. Strenta, funded in part by the National Science Foundation, concluded that the underlying feature of the dropout rate wasn't race but academic preparation. If a student entered an Ivy with an SAT score under 550 in math, he was only a fifth as likely to graduate with a STEM degree as a student whose SAT score was over 700.

The key to understanding this disparity wasn't absolute academic preparation but relative preparation. "A freshman physics class at Dartmouth," Messrs. Sander and Taylor write, "would presume that students were comfortable with calculus and fairly complex, realistic models of natural phenomena; a freshman physics class at Fisk—or at the University of Tennessee—would probably start with algebraic approaches." Historically black colleges, in fact, were producing far greater numbers of black STEM graduates than the Ivies.

In short, a system of racial preferences was placing students with the strongest scientific ability at the institutions where they were least likely to achieve their goals. As one black Dartmouth graduate told Messrs. Sander and Taylor about her experience in biochemistry, "It is not until you meet the best that you realize that you are in a whole other playing field. At first I thought I could handle it, but then as freshman year rolled along, I got hammered academically. People in my class had had science since grammar school, but I wasn't even introduced to science until my sophomore year of high school. . . . I had never developed the skills I needed to achieve." Like many others in her position, she switched to a humanities major.

The Elliott-Strenta research, published in 1996, met with silence from the academic establishment, as did research in succeeding years that deepened their theory. But this all changed when Mr. Sander analyzed the troubling performance of many black law-school students at UCLA in the late 1990s. About half of them, he found, ended up in the bottom 10th of the class and achieved only a 50% pass rate in bar exams, compared with 90% for whites. The reason? Many had been admitted with large racial preferences. Though a mismatched undergraduate might switch to an easier major without punishing anything more than his dreams, failing the bar exam could ruin a career.

"Orwellian" is one word that "Mismatch" uses to describe the energetic—and frequently unedifying—attempts to refute Mr. Sander's research after it was published in 2005. A troubling legacy of the assault, given that colleges are supposed to exist to increase our sum of knowledge, is that administrators have become increasingly reluctant to release the core data by which their admissions policies can be judged. Nevertheless, Messrs. Sander and Taylor have marshaled a formidable amount of evidence to substantiate the mismatch theory, and while this makes the narrative dense at times, the payoff is persuasiveness.

The authors also take in the bigger picture, by looking at "the breadth of mismatch" in the larger university culture. They describe the psychological effects of preferences ("mismatch can derail lives"), the echo chamber of "happy talk" in the media, the complicated judicial reasoning surrounding affirmative action, and the results of Proposition 209 in California, where universities ignored what they described as positive academic results and began implementing "holistic" policies to keep up minority enrollment. Such shifts play a role in the current Supreme Court case involving the University of Texas. For all its academic analysis and argument, "Mismatch" is very much in the tradition of the muckraking that Lincoln Steffens did a century ago when he took on the corruption in American cities; indeed, the book could be titled "The Shame of the Colleges."

Mr. Butterworth is a contributor to Newsweek and editor at large for STATS.org.

On Tuesday, the board passed a revised strategic plan that says that by 2018, it wants 90 percent of Asian students, 88 percent of white students, 81 percent of Hispanics and 74 percent of black students to be reading at or above grade level. For math, the goals are 92 percent of Asian kids to be proficient, whites at 86 percent, Hispanics at 80 percent and blacks at 74 percent. It also measures by other groupings, such as poverty and disabilities, reported the Palm Beach Post.

The plan has infuriated many community activists in Palm Beach County and across the state.

On Tuesday, the board passed a revised strategic plan that says that by 2018, it wants 90 percent of Asian students, 88 percent of white students, 81 percent of Hispanics and 74 percent of black students to be reading at or above grade level. For math, the goals are 92 percent of Asian kids to be proficient, whites at 86 percent, Hispanics at 80 percent and blacks at 74 percent. It also measures by other groupings, such as poverty and disabilities, reported the Palm Beach Post.

The plan has infuriated many community activists in Palm Beach County and across the state.

October 21, 2012 A Socialist Agenda Behind Florida's New Race-Based Education Standards?M Catharine EvansYou may never have heard of Amy Wilkins, but she played a major role in the Florida public school system's recent changes in standards of student achievement.Wilkins started out as a community organizer and former worker with the Children's Defense Fund (CDF), and is now VP for an education nonprofit with ties to former CDF personnel.

The grandniece of civil rights icon and NAACP president Roy Wilkins has done a 180-degree turn from pushing unreasonably high benchmarks for evaluating schools based on testing outcomes [No Child Left Behind in 2002] to recently setting the guidelines for the state of Florida's new separation of standards according to subgroups including black, Latino, and special needs.

Amy's pedigree has made her one of the most influential education lobbyists in Washington. In 2001 she broke with black leaders and became one of the few liberals to back tougher testing standards for all students in low-performing schools.

The liberal Brookings Institution in 2001 questioned why Democrats including Wilkins wanted to ramrod NCLB through when it didn't make sense:

But jettisoning the tough but fatally flawed standards for judging school performance has been a lot harder than Kress expected -- thanks to the influential congressional Democrats and left-leaning education organizations who have come around to thinking that testing is a way to force educators to focus on disadvantaged and minority students.

Over a decade later, Wilkins is now Vice President for Government Affairs and Communication for the Education Trust, an organization that is a leader in the campaign to lower academic standards for minorities. Apparently, her understanding of what works has evolved into a contradiction of her original stance.

Amy Wilkins of The Education Trust, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group for low-income and minority students, said Florida officials could have described the interim plan in a "less inflammatory way." But she said it's wrong to criticize the plan, which her group designed. [snip]

She called it "a sensible, ambitious goal" that doesn't sugarcoat the neediest students' low proficiency levels. For instance, while it seeks only 74% reading proficiency for African-American students, it notes that only 38% were proficient last year, far fewer than white students, at 69%. It pushes for 36% more African-American students to become proficient in five years, vs. only 19% more white students.

Wilkins said about 20 states have adopted similar guidelines to qualify for waivers from the federal No Child Left Behind law. Such guidelines demand "more improvement, and faster improvement, for the kids who are furthest behind. If people focused on that... we might get a little further without the fireworks."

Wilkins and many other stakeholders in the education reform movement have little or no direct experience teaching or managing schools. Yet, self-styled reformers such as Wilkins advocate sweeping policy changes which affect students, parents, and anyone else impacted by education.

In a February 2012 interview with NPR, Wilkins was asked about the need to oust bad teachers from the classroom.

Well, yeah, I mean, there are some people who are perfectly wonderful human beings who don't belong in a classroom -- including me, right. I should not be a teacher, but I think I'm still a pretty good person. But yeah, there are -- there is a group of teachers who probably ought not be in the classroom.

She also told the host that a master's degree "doesn't matter" and adds nothing to student achievement. Why should a state submit to changes in its policies made by someone with little skin in the education game other than that of being a social activist?

The Racist and the Diversity CzarGrouping Asians together for the purpose of fostering “diversity” in America is insulting.byYing Ma

October 30, 2012 - 10:07 pm Earlier this month, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in Fisher v. University of Texas, a case challenging the use of racial preferences in the university admissions process. The case has led supporters and opponents to engage in a heated national debate about the merits of affirmative action, but few have noticed that one of the best reminders of the policy’s absurdities actually comes from the territorial conflicts currently raging in Asia.

In the world of affirmative action, Asians-Americans, along with other races, are lumped together as a single group that receives, or are excluded from, employment, education, contracting, or other positions. In the real world, however, the people of Asia not only are not interchangeable tokens; they have numerous reasons not to like each other. Grouping Asians together for the purpose of fostering “diversity” in America is not only ignorant but also insulting.

In recent months, nasty territorial squabbles over islands in the South China Sea have sparked widespread and at times, violent protests featuring one Asian nationality against another. China stands at the center of Asia’s simmering tensions. Just last month, anti-Japanese protests broke out in over 100 Chinese cities. Protestors ransacked Japanese stores, disrupted work at factories, burned Japanese flags, threw bottles, eggs, and apples outside of the Japanese embassy in Beijing, and called for the annihilation of Japan. Numerous Japanese stores in China closed temporarily, and Japan’s top manufacturers—such as Panasonic, Canon, and Toyota—halted production. Since then, consumer boycotts against Japanese cars in China have led to plunging sales for Japanese automakers.

These protests raged over the Japanese government’s September 11 purchase from private ownership of various disputed islands claimed by China and administered by Japan. Tokyo had intended for the “nationalization” of the islands, called Diaoyu in China and Senkaku in Japan, to prevent further escalation of bilateral conflict, but it only reminded Chinese citizens of Japan’s naked land grab in China before and during World War II.

Unfortunately for Japan, the Chinese are not the only ones protesting against it. Citizens of Taiwan, a former colony of Japan that also claims the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands, have staged what Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou has called “patriotic” demonstrations against Japan. During the last week of September, a flotilla of nearly 80 Taiwanese fishing boats, escorted by coast guard ships, even traveled to the disputed area to assert their historic fishing rights and “protect” the islands.

Meanwhile, the South Koreans have chimed in as well. They, too, have an ongoing dispute with Japan over a small (though different) group of islands in the South China Sea. They, too, have staged protests and proclaimed that they have not forgiven Japan for its war-time sins, especially the transgression of forcing South Korean women to serve as sex slaves to Japanese soldiers.

If this is not enough conflict, Vietnam and the Philippines have each engaged in tense standoffs with China as well. They, too, have overlapping territorial claims in the South China Sea and have historically clashed with China over various disputed islands. And just this month, the South Korean coast guard fired a rubber bullet at a Chinese fisherman and raided his boat, which they claimed had illegally entered South Korean waters in the Yellow Sea. The fisherman subsequently died from his injuries.

These political, territorial, and ethnic quarrels dominate the headlines in Asia. Other ongoing conflicts—such as India and Pakistan’s deep-seated bilateral animosity, China’s refusal to renounce the use of force to reunify with Taiwan, or North Korea’s hostilities toward South Korea and Japan—similarly evoke raw emotions and offer no easy solutions. This does not mean that all Asians despise each other or that they will not be able to peacefully resolve their conflicts. But the complexities of Asia’s political landscape or cultural heritage simply do not matter to diversity czars in America, who count yellow people against black, white, and brown folks as mere statistics.

One statistic, 37.2%, reflects the freshmen Asian enrollment in 1995 at the University of California, Berkeley, an institution that aggressively practiced racial preferences before voters in California banned the practice in 1996. Another statistic, 46%, shows Asian freshmen enrollment at Berkeley in 2012, a level of participation that the university’s bean counters, when unencumbered by state law, considered to be too high.

In other words, modern racial divvying not only ignores the inherent political, cultural, and historical differences within different ethnic groups, it caps their success as a race as well. Ironically, old-fashioned racists usually discriminate this way as well—for instance, by referring to Chinese, Vietnamese, Filipinos, Koreans, and Japanese alike as “Chinamen.”

Today, diversity czars feel no shame when they lump ethnicities together and pit different races against each other. Whatever the Supreme Court decides in Fisher v. University of Texas, this country would do well to end the sordid business of racial classification and preferences sooner rather than later.

"Black" is an construct, as is "Asian" or "white". There is no such thing as "Asian" in asia, there are distinct ethnicities and nations. Ask a Filipino how he likes being lumped in with Japanese into one group. I doubt many would be happy with the idea. I know how the majority of Han Chinese feel about sharing anything with Japanese.